discstalgia —

Sony announces the end of the MiniDisc

CD and MP3 prematurely killed the MiniDisc star.

Get out your calendars—Sony will be making its final MiniDisc stereo system in March, marking an end to the 20-year-old media format.

MiniDisc was launched in 1992, but never saw widespread success outside of Japan. Its rise in the West was stymied by the existing popularity of the CD and the growth of the MP3 format and its smaller, more battery-efficient portable players.

It was based around small, rewritable optical disks housed in a plastic shell with a storage capacity of 80 minutes. An attempted reboot in 2004 as Hi-MD failed miserably, and sales of portable MiniDisc players ended in 2011.

But the format did prove popular among sound engineers and journalists, who used MiniDisc players to record sounds, jingles and interviews before adequate solid-state storage options arrived.

The announcement was made alongside the release of a teaser video for a Playstation press conference, where it's widely expected that a new console will be announced.

DRM killed it, back in the day. They had too much copy management stuff on it.

I used minidiscs a lot in college, when I was studying music technology. We had the data variant, which we could use with 8 track recorders. But you couldn't just copy your work onto a computer digitally, you had to use an analogue 8 track audio input. Getting songs onto minidiscs for use in portable players was even worse.

This wouldn't have been so bad, but they were competing against CDs. CDs got damaged easier, and didn't do fancy things like store song titles, and nobody used the rewritable ones, and you couldn't record in a random access manner… but that didn't matter, because Apple were marketing Rip, Mix, Burn, so you could put your music anywhere.

I love my minidiscs. Got my first player in 98, after seeing them used at a show. When Radio City bought the St Johns Beacon in Liverpool, and turned it into their studio (yes, the tallest building in the city is the radio station and it's studios) they went to all minidisc.

I have ot say, I prefered the sound from Sharp systems rather than Sony (friend at Uni had a Sony one, didn't sound as good as my MD-MS701. I then added in a 3CD, 3CD hifi in 2000, and in 2001 I put a 10-MD changer in my car (although that WAS Sony - was hard to find anyone else that made MD multichangers)

Back when, my portable mini disc recorder beat the pants off portable CD players and early MP3 players with their tiny storage capacities.

Mini disc was horrible for many years because of lossy sound compression to achieve the "better" storage capacity. Sony later improved the compression used and I believe enabled non-lossy compression as well. Also, as mentioned above the pain in the butt DRM they used was even worse than the DAT one which at least if you spend enough money could buy a PLayer/recorder which ignored the DRM flags.

Audiophiles, live music tapers, and sound engineers all said no to the needless reduction in quality when compared to other medium available (such as the tempermental DAT or CDr) at the time did no such reduction. The mini disc also when first introduced was expensive and again due to the lossy compression produced lower quality sound compared to a normal CD player.

So "beating the pants" is a question of when you purchased it, and really over stating the truth when the quality finally got better in 2004. It still wasn't worth it over a CD with its better sound.

Is there a quality difference between CD and MD; how about HiDef MD verses CD?

Mini-Discs used lossy compression (a proprietary format called ATRAC). Very late in the game, with Hi-MD, the option to record as lossless PCM was added, because the expanded disc capacity could now reasonably hold that quantity of data. But, in general, CD >>> MP3 > MD (although you can encode MP3s with settings at a much worse quality than MDs, which was the general case in the first years of MP3 usage).

DRM killed it, back in the day. They had too much copy management stuff on it.

I used minidiscs a lot in college, when I was studying music technology. We had the data variant, which we could use with 8 track recorders. But you couldn't just copy your work onto a computer digitally, you had to use an analogue 8 track audio input.

I did actually see a press release for an MD DATA format, in some audiophile magazine of the time. The highest density data discs in wide use at the time were the Iomega 100MB ZIP discs, and these would have been something like 185 or 210270? It would have been great to see this actually in the market, because the transport mechanism was small enough they could have stuck it in laptops instead of the 3.5" floppy. Imagine how things would have been different had that happened.

If you ever need a one work answer to what went wrong with Sony, though, the answer is ATRAC.

This is what Sony has done to seemingly every cute new format they've had after Beta: lard it up with useless-to-consumer DRM and charge too much. Oh, and prevent others from manufacturing lower cost storage media for the first couple of years, until most people have given up on the format. I guess we can argue whether Blu-ray broke that cycle or continues it

It wasn't slowed in the US because of the rise of streaming and .mp3! It came out in Japan long before those were commonly available!

Import of the Minidisc was BLOCKED BY CONGRESS because the industry had lobbied them to require hardware-based DRM. But neither consumers or manufacturers wanted anything to do with that. As a result, DRM-equipped Minidisc devices did not show up on U.S. shelves for a full 10 years.

You can point fingers straight at the music industry. They fought cassette tapes, and lost. They fought CDs, and lost. (Never mind that when those formats became available, their profits went way UP!)

The MiniDisc was the only major music format over which the music industry won their battle... which lasted for fully half the medium's lifetime.

To add to what I just wrote: the music industry wanted to block MiniDisc because it made "perfect" digital recordings that could easily be copied infinitely without loss of fidelity. (This was before the advent of .mp3 or burnable CDs... CD-RW is basically just a large MiniDisc.) The music industry saw that as a threat and lobbied Congress to stop their import or manufacture here in the U.S. until such time as DRM was implemented.

But few manufacturers were interested in implementing DRM. Not to mention that consumers didn't want DRM-laden devices. The upshot was: they were very rare in the United States. You could buy one -- full of DRM -- but they were prohibitively expensive for most people, precisely because of their rarity.

I loved my MD Walkman. I bought a stereo microphone for it to record performances. You could do basic audio editing right on the device. It also prompted me to get a CD Walkman with an optical out so I could make mix Mini discs. At the time I was traveling a lot (1998), and it was amazing to have such a setup that was so portable. I also ended up buying an MD car stereo. Once I got rid of that I stopped using MD. I think it was when I got a car CD player that could read mp3, it was crazy to have a hundred songs on a disc.

I never did buy any music in MD format. It would have been dead anyway with the advent of iTunes and the like, but at the time it was a shame the format was hampered with politics and DRM.

I didn't realize these were still around. I had player shortly after they first became available in the states, but got gifted a CD-changer in the car not long after - and there didn't do much with it later.

I used to use a portable minidisc recorder as my in-car audio mechanism; I'd just play mp3s on shuffle overnight while recording it to minidisc in LP4 mode, and that was how I'd "sync" in 5 hours' worth of music. Worked great. Then my minidisc recorder got stolen.

So I replaced it with another one, just as in-car MP3-capable CD players were getting cheap.

I still have the replacement player, though. When I lived in NYC, MC Frontalot asked me if I could bootleg one of his early concerts (so he could post it on the VSP section of his site), which I did, using it. Of course I also still have the disc, which Front was kind enough to sign. The recording quality wasn't amazing but he still posted it anyway.

My Minidiscs are still perfectly playable 15 years on. Find any Cd that is.

I also remember when CD-ROms were new, int he early 90s. i was doing teaching assistance at my school, and it had a CD-ROm on an Acorn A310. It was a big, caddy based drive. That was actualy a blessing for the school, as the CDs then were protected, people only handled the caddy. In fact, they bought extra caddies, so there was one per disc and they never came out. in 98, they were all still usable, barely scratched. At that point the school was getting Windows based gear and starting to retire the Acorn stuff though.

What would have happened, if we'd decided to encase CDs in caddies, much like Minidiscs were?

I did actually see a press release for an MD DATA format, in some audiophile magazine of the time. The highest density data discs in wide use at the time were the Iomega 100MB ZIP discs, and these would have been something like 185 or 210270?

I used to have a Sony MD DATA drive, the original MDH-10. It was small, decently fast, and quite portable. It was also SCSI-2 so I only ever used it on my personal computers. If the format had survived a bit better, into the USB age, I think it could have fared well.

What? 29 comments and nobody nitpicked on the distinction between optical and magneto-optical? Ok, then I finally did it now...

And MiniDisc raises memories. I got an MD player some time back in the late 90s. It served me very well and the long hours of music for train rides were so much easier to handle than before. I could use it while biking because the shock protection was so much better than what was available for CD players. Stuff never skipped. It also had a really nice size and easily fit various pockets, unlike anything CD based.The rather expensive player I got was even a very decent recording device. A pair of in-ear microphones served me well during some concerts and got me some surprisingly good bootlegs.

Man, I remember stuffing a TOSlink cable in the back of some friends stereo and "ripping" an occasional CD this way. Times were so different back then.

I used to have a Sony MD DATA drive, the original MDH-10. It was small, decently fast, and quite portable. It was also SCSI-2 so I only ever used it on my personal computers. If the format had survived a bit better, into the USB age, I think it could have fared well.

Like most other supposed replacements for floppy disks before flash USB drives, MD Data was just too proprietary and encumbered by licensing fees to become a major success. Apple and Dell endorsement also gave Zip disks an initial advantage, although that was not enough to make them standard, either.

In retrospect it seem almost inconceivable that people still had to use 3½" floppy disks in the late 1990's and early 2000's, it's almost like a bad dream. CD-R/W was available towards the end of that era, but it never fully replaced the floppy disk, because it wasn't as easy to use and media was initially quite expensive. The failure to replace floppy disks in time is a lesson of what happens when there are no open industry standards.

What prevented MD adoption here was lack of a DataMD standard. I remember writing Sony when they were first introduced asking them to put them out for data usage, and go a politely worded response saying "No, never." I had no use for a music MD and if I couldn't replace my Bernoulli Box with a DataMD, then I hand no use for the format. They could have killed Zip drives with their click-of-death, and chose not to. I've been wary of proprietary Sony formats ever since.

My Minidiscs are still perfectly playable 15 years on. Find any Cd that is.

I have a rather large CD collection dating back 20 years. Every single disc I've tried to play is still playable. Granted, I hardly ever try to play a disc since I ripped them all to mp3 ages ago. Maybe I'll go down to my storage unit to fish out one of my 20-year-old CDs and see if it still works.

To me, music CDs have just been installation media for years, and now that I am satisfied with my various backup methods (local NAS for time machine, CrashPlan for offsite) I've just been cutting out the middle step and buying mp3s directly.

All the commentators here are missing the point. It's probably an age thing...

Minidiscs came out a long time before MP3 players. They came out a long time before CD-Burners (and a VERY long time before CD-Burners were inexpensive enough that normal people bought them). Hell, they came out years before most people had a computer at home, and if you did, it was at best a 66MHz 486 running MS-DOS, with something like a 80MByte hard drive that couldn't very well store even a single CD worth of MP3s, and probably wasn't fast enough to play back MP3s in real-time anyhow, if you could even find software designed to do so...

When minidiscs came out, they were an incredible leap forward. Random access, tiny magneto-optical discs with durable caddies, giving home users editing capabilities for the first time, re-writable many thousands of times without issues (CD-RWs may have claimed similar, but the NEVER worked well), and CD-quality audio.

Anyone who claims the sound quality wasn't awesome are either talking about the much, much later very-low bitrate form of ATRAC designed to get several hours of speech on a single MD and compete with MP3s, or used some crappy non-Sony recorders that cut corners and sacrificed quality. ATRAC was based on MPEG-1 Layer 2, aka MUSICAM, which performs incredibly well at high bitrates, and is still a highly respected codec used in Sony's theatre audio system, SDDS, which competes with Dolby Digital and DTS.

The physical format was superb. At a time when CDs were the high-tech option, Minidisc owners were laughing at you, fumbling around with one finger in the center and one on the edge of a huge fragile disc, trying not to get finger prints on it, needing to turn on some lights to do this safely, and not put your CD in upside down... etc. You could swap MDs without the slightest thought, like floppy disks but even smaller and more convenient.

And the recording and editing capabilities were unheard-of in the consumer space. You could hook it up to your radio for a couple hours, and in a few seconds, edit out everything but the one song you wanted, and then do it again, and again, and again. And untold fun could be had splicing a word from hours later into the middle of someone's speech. Oh the horrible things former president Regan said to my friends, thanks to my MD!

And let's not forget battery life. Sony has always been superb in that category, and MDs were years ahead of their discman portables. Most people were getting 2-3 hours on a pair of AA batteries with their CD players, while I would get about 14 hours with my MDs, IIRC. Later models did even better. And MDs were pretty damn quiet, while portable CD players were several times noisier.

But MD was never successful, because Sony did several things wrong. First was the limited form factors... You could get a tiny portable unit, or a stackable stereo component, and NOTHING ELSE. Many years later, I do recall Sony coming out with a mini-system with a built-in minidisc deck, but that was too late in the game, and pretty expensive IIRC. The lack of a car stereo minidisc deck galled me for a long time, too. FM transmitters and cassette adapters are piss-poor solutions, and I generally wouldn't want to carry my portable MD player to/from my car, anyhow. But the biggest one, by far, was the lack of a MD for your computer...

MDs came out a couple years before Iomega Zip drives, back where floppies were still the primary medium for exchanging computer files. (Audio) MDs were about 140MBytes in size, while Zip disks were only 100MBytes, and the later was bigger, more fragile, and FAR more expensive. Ditto for the floppy-sized "Superdisks" that were popular with iMac users. Cheap Sony MDs could have become the standard format for computer users for over a decade, displacing the above formats, eliminating the horrible floppy disk years sooner, and probably would have pushed back adoption of CD-Rs for a few years, and likely wouldn't have been displayed by the uptake of CD-Rs, but staying the standard format until 1GB+ USB Flash Drives came along in just the past few years.

If Sony had been willing to go that route, not only would the MD have been ubiquitous for data, but that would have given the MD a huge advantage in the audio market, and everyone would have been burning their Napster, Kazaa, and now iTunes / Amazon music downloads to MDs for playback on their home stereos, in their car, etc, since that would be easier an cheaper than burning to CD-R, easy to delete songs, make and edit mixes, and erase the discs later for reuse. I'm sure the MP3 player revolution would still have happened, but the MD could have filled a big gap, and advanced music and computer technology by several years, and carved out a huge market for itself in the process.

But that never happened. There was at least one computer drive sold, but it was expensive and high-end, for professional-only use, requiring a SCSI controller, and special "DATA" MDs, not working with the common audio MDs... The same issue MD ran into with multi-track recording studio systems. While you can claim Sony's failure to do all these things may have stemmed from DRM concerns, I don't think that's true. They simply had a lack of vision, or a myopic lack of interest in finding new markets for MD, when they so very easily could have done so. Sony has a terrible policy of making 10 different products for 10 different uses, so that they can charge 10 different premium prices. It wouldn't have sat well with them if MD had become popular with both audio and data, with more capable consumer devices eating away at their enterprise sales (even if the later market would have been bigger as a result). This fact should be incredibly obvious looking at the introduction of their UMD format, when they already had MD discs of similar physical and data sizes that would have done the job even better than yet another new format.

Sony's failure to develop a market for their MDs was a sign of things to come, and the start of the downfall of the once-mighty Sony. Of course, these days they're doing pretty well, with Blu-Ray having won the format war, and their Playstation consoles keeping them relevant, but the Sony of today isn't remotely the behemoth that it was when MDs came out. The world would be a very different play today if Sony had been less dysfunctional 20 years ago.

My Minidiscs are still perfectly playable 15 years on. Find any Cd that is.

I have several hundred that fit that description on shelves in my room. I own over 1300 CDs. the lifespan of CDs is ridiculously underestimated.

One of the only times I ever remember seeing MD albums being sold was back in 1995. I helped open the Eastgate Best Buy and one night I went up to Tri County to check out their store, b/c it was a bit bigger than ours. They had some extra items we didn't have, a bit more space between the racks of music and movies and a few sections full of Minidiscs. None of my friends (US anyway, international friends had them) ever bought a MD player and I thought it was neat that they were being sold, but they weren't ever enticing enough to make a jump.

1993 is when it started? Maybe in the U.S., but I had mini-disc players from around 1989 from Japan.I loved the minidisc and still have a large collection. That being said, I can now just pull out my cell phone and record a conversation with good quality, so their use has sadly waned.

What? 29 comments and nobody nitpicked on the distinction between optical and magneto-optical? Ok, then I finally did it now....]

Only just read the article, and this jumped out at me too. I read a lot of hi-fi magazines at the time and the technology of mini disc was featured a lot when it was still deemed to be "the next big format".

I remember one of the features of the blank discs was that once you had put music on it, you could edit it and change the track order. Never quite understood if it physically moved the song or just changed the running order in a data table.

Is also remember that MD had a rival at the same time in Philips' DCC Digital Compact Cassette, which promised better sound quality.MD ads at the time just said "good digital sound" while DCC ads said "CD quality". Must have been the Sony compression I guess.

DCC obviously wasn't editable in the same way (the running order couldn't be altered) and as it still used spools of tape, skipping to the next track still required fast-forwarding, and it had to be rewound at the end (like a VHS or DAT - DCC was also single-sided). The upside was that a DCC player could play all your old analogue cassettes.

I never knew anyone with a DCC, and only know one person with a mini disc - which he still has, and uses today. I always thought that a portable MD player had a jewel-like quality to it, compared to a tape Walkman - so small but packed with technology. That's just me I guess.

Both formats pretty much hit the skids when MP3 came along.

Oh, and:

Andrew Norton wrote:

My Minidiscs are still perfectly playable 15 years on. Find any Cd that is.

Every CD I ever bought is still perfectly playable, including the very first one I got in 1991 - plus I have some second-hand discs from the late 80's.

All the commentators here are missing the point. It's probably an age thing...

Thanks for the alternative-history what if? (+1 interesting read), I'll posit a different theory...

MD failed because it was not affordable for the teen market. At the time MD came out, me and all my friends used Sony Walkmans or other (usually cheaper) brands. The compact cassette was ubiquitous, playable in almost every home, car, school and business and affordable to all. The MD was none of those things.

And now Blu-ray, the supposed winner of the format war, may well have won after the ship has sailed. It cost too much at a time when it might have captured the market. It remains expensive when most people are still happy with DVD and now Streaming media services are starting to make physical media irrelevant.